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Good news for gamers!
While browsing around at ebay, I found out that 290 is available for under 300$ and 290x is available for under 400$ with buy it now option!
Every miner is getting rid of them.
I think its supply / demand over again, but this time, Its the over way around

Since ebay sellers are not considered "authorized resellers" none of the manufacturers are required to honor their product warranties in the event of a failure....at least not for US residents.

Hmm that's right they are not authorized re sellers but this applies to everything thats being sold one ebay (most of the stuff is used)
Personally, I think if a graphics card can last 5 years of operation (physically), its actual gaming life span is not more than 3 years lol. still for 370$, a 290x with remaining life of say 2.5 years (assuming, mining takes away half of its physical life span, which I dont think is the case), is not a bad deal.

Hmm that's right they are not authorized re sellers but this applies to everything thats being sold one ebay (most of the stuff is used)
Personally, I think if a graphics card can last 5 years of operation (physically), its actual gaming life span is not more than 3 years lol. still for 370$, a 290x with remaining life of say 2.5 years (assuming, mining takes away half of its physical life span, which I dont think is the case), is not a bad deal.

Quite a few of the cards used for mining have their lives shortened by a lot more than 2.5yrs. Those cards are heavily abused. If they last a year, consider yourself lucky.

Cheapest 290 has been below 400€ here for months (new). Used reference 290 goes for 250€-300€. It looks like I'm going to get rather ****ty price from my MSI 290 Gaming. People want to get rid of them and no one wants to buy them. Mining is the main reason for all that but I can see why gamers don't want 290's. NVIDIA just has better overall package in my opinion.

Cheapest 290 has been below 400€ here for months (new). Used reference 290 goes for 250€-300€. It looks like I'm going to get rather ****ty price from my MSI 290 Gaming. People want to get rid of them and no one wants to buy them. Mining is the main reason for all that but I can see why gamers don't want 290's. NVIDIA just has better overall package in my opinion.

Personally speaking I can get a good brand new after market 290 for £320 in the UK. On the other hand a good after market 780 costs £380, and I see nothing to justify that extra £60. Either way I'll be waiting until the next major release, I feel no need to upgrade from what I'm using. Sadly that's likely going to end up being next year or very late this.

Exactly.. lol. It's not like they will fail right after having mined for a month or two straight. They're meant to "RUN" .... It's just the same as playing a heavy load game for a month. Already people are piling up in my forum who say "sorry I don't wanna buy this because it's a miners card" ... **** sake I tell you. ****in people being supersticious about hardware lol.

In terms of heat, noise, features and software. I have to admit but life is easier with NVIDIA. At least in my case. It's not always about pure theoretical performance but there are few things that just make NVIDIA better choice for me. Numerous small things add up and made the 290 usability a bit painful.

290 software isn't quite bug free yet.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darkest

Personally speaking I can get a good brand new after market 290 for £320 in the UK. On the other hand a good after market 780 costs £380, and I see nothing to justify that extra £60. Either way I'll be waiting until the next major release, I feel no need to upgrade from what I'm using. Sadly that's likely going to end up being next year or very late this.

Cheapest GTX 780 goes for ~375 € here.

If the warranty is there, it doesn't matter at all if it has been a mining car.

I see this assumption that the cards have been abused because of running 24/7 *in harsh conditions* everywhere. Literally everywhere. Cards know how to protect themselves. AMD / Nvidia wouldn't sell you a card that they know doesn't last as least as long as the warranty period even if it is *abused*. Second of all, which *smart* miners overclock heavily or play with the voltage? So that they spend more on power?

Yeah, when you stack multiple cards you will get higher temperatures. Running a GPU 24/7 does NOT kill it, where did you hear that?... I've been folding for 3 years now, 24/7, yeah my cards are not dead for sure.

still, we know not to get mining cards, but that is not going to change the insane amount of supply injection in the market. this will lower AMD card's demand and ultimately we will see 290x for 500$ new from vendors. consequently, 500$ 290x will cause 780ti and gtx 780's prices to drop.

There is a strong superstiton within the nvidia users. Costlier is better. It helps NVIDIA alot.

It depends what you want but the price difference is hardly anything. However, when both are overclocked to offer similar speed NVIDIA has massive noise & temperature advantage.

I had few annoyances with the card that made me switch back: zero core power saving is just damn buggy. Sometimes it fails to power up the card correctly and you have to replug display (could be 75Hz issue) to get the picture after idling (if zero core kicked in). Also I need to restart speedfan every time zero core activates or it will report -999c for GPU temp and 0 RPM fan speed (though that is likely speedfan bug but still). Also VRAM power saving doesn't work at all when using 75Hz (thus idle temps are 20c higher than on GTX 780). Also 2d desktop power saving just simply sucks. 290 obviously dumps a lot more heat in your case and is noisier than GTX 780 with same cooler.

It's not possible to enhance AA (i.e. 2xMSAA in game, enhance it to 8xMSAA). You can't mix, say 8xMSAA and 4xTrSSAA because samples go hand in hand with MSAA (and in general adaptive AA looks worse than NVIDIA's TrSSAA). It's not possible to tinker with AA so it either works or it doesn't and often looks worse than what you can get with NVIDIA using custom AA bits. Also MLAA just sucks and is incredibly resource heavy. I have to say that I really missed TXAA. I just happen to love it. Also downsampling is just so simple.

I've noticed some weirdness like slow window resizing in certain situations (foobar with waveform seeker bar, WMP when playing video).

Hmm, I never owned r9 290/X, So i cant comment on those. Instead, I used to own 7970 in xfire non-reference versions from sapphire. they were pretty damn good lol, no driver issues etc. I bought them for 230$ each box packed from newegg. To me, Amd is just cheaper than nvidia while it does perform same. with nvidia you get better driver \ SLI profile support to begin with, while AMD catches up slowly. all this is my personal analysis lol, dont bash me

I see this assumption that the cards have been abused because of running 24/7 *in harsh conditions* everywhere. Literally everywhere. Cards know how to protect themselves. AMD / Nvidia wouldn't sell you a card that they know doesn't last as least as long as the warranty period even if it is *abused*. Second of all, which *smart* miners overclock heavily or play with the voltage? So that they spend more on power?

Yeah, when you stack multiple cards you will get higher temperatures. Running a GPU 24/7 does NOT kill it, where did you hear that?... I've been folding for 3 years now, 24/7, yeah my cards are not dead for sure.

I heard it from one local miner, he had a couple 7970s and vram couldnt handle it and busted..

And I've seen this data by overclockers.uk store, for example 290 PCS+ says its not suitable for mining, even though it has a killer cooler on top of it